


Wax Wings

by horrorgremlin (catstuff)



Series: Once Bitten [10]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Burning, Complicated post-abuse narrative, Disordered Eating, Drug use (weed), Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Multi, PTSD, Trans Male Character, Transgender Characters, Vampires, not violent per se but definitely gets gore-y, secondhand trauma, vampire biology, vampire top surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23877661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catstuff/pseuds/horrorgremlin
Summary: “I just need something to change. Something has to get better. I know I don’t know what I’m signing up for, I know it has nothing to do with her. But I need something. Just one thing. Something has to give. Right?”Isaac is torn; they have no doubt that Grayson needs this, he needs it more than they did, but is he as prepared to cope with the process?
Series: Once Bitten [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1702981
Kudos: 1





	Wax Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: disordered eating, severe burning flesh, unverified medical accuracy, relationship with abuser, drug use (weed), secondhand trauma, PTSD.

Mariah hasn’t ventured outside much between dawn and dusk in a long while, even though she could; while keeping a daytime schedule is a marker of strength, an honest signal of a steady diet, the majority of her work these days is the type most easily done under cover of darkness, when the city’s most desperate and verminous come alive.

Since her last fight with Grayson, though, she’s felt haunted at all her usual midnight haunts. He’s become part of what she expects from the fabric of her days, and she notices too much when he’s not there any more to snark back and forth with in the office, especially when Samar isn’t there either and it’s just her and the claustrophobic silence. Even her apartment feels empty, despite Grayson’s mostly avoiding it; now she just sees the heaps of garbage that make him want to stay away. So she’s put Samar in charge of operations for the time being, and flipped her schedule.

Usually, when she needs to shake things up, she takes a road trip, but for some reason, she’s reluctant to stray too far. It’s definitely not in case Grayson calls her. She can’t even imagine being that pathetic, just waiting around for some guy to call. If he wanted to talk, he’d have answered her texts. Or her calls. Or her voicemails.

And now she’s on a crosstown bus in the middle of the afternoon, nowhere to be, leaning against the window and staring up at the sky. It’s a bright and sunny day, a rarity in Cleveland. That’s something she likes about this city: not overly optimistic. She raises a hand and watches the glow shift across her skin as the bus turns. It skims over her skin without touching her.

Sunlight was one of the hardest lessons Mariah had had to learn as a new vampire, and there were plenty to choose from. The week after turning, in the morning on her way to school, her stomach had grumbled, followed by the very faint but growing smell of acrid smoke. Her hands and face were safe tucked into her winter coat, but her bare legs started to itch, and by the time she connected the dots her skin was beginning to blister. She managed to turn around and make it back home before catching fire.

That was the first time it sunk in that her vampiric superpowers came with a catch, a less obvious one than needing to drink blood all the time. Okay, yes, she should have seen it or something like it coming, but in her defense she never _really_ asked to be a vampire — if she had, she would have already done the research in advance. The backs of her thighs stayed sunburnt as a reminder of her hubris, making it hard to sit down, and lingering longer than any sunburn should. She hasn’t made the same mistake since.

A woman gets on the bus and sits across from Mariah, stealing her out of her reveries. Something about the stranger reminds her of him, not the way she looks, but her tightly drawn in demeanor, tense and alert as her eyes flick between her phone screen and the window next to her. Mariah waits for a red light, then smoothly slides across the aisle to sit next to the woman.

She pays Mariah no attention, except to scoot over imperceptibly, the barest recognition of another body occupying the space beside her. Mariah lets the woman ignore her, for now, reading her text conversations sidelong. That doesn’t stay interesting for very long. Mariah shifts in her seat, expanding into the stranger’s space. This boring nobody has things that Mariah doesn’t: skin that doesn’t catch fire in the sun, an appetite that leans more toward plants and cooked things, maybe love. Someone that she’s texting has a heart emoji as part of their name saved in her phone, indicating the ability to rely on something outside herself.

Finally, the woman reacts to her blatant staring.

“Excuse me,” she says brusquely.

“Yes?” Mariah asks, as if she’s been approached on the street while minding her own business, and is maybe about to be asked for directions.

The woman gives her a blank, irritated stare, then huffs under her breath and looks back down, apparently deciding it’s not worth it.

Mariah doesn’t like that.

“No,” she insists. “What were you going to say?”

The stranger’s posture grows more afraid and more defensive.

“Could you please mind your own business?”

A static cloud of rebelliousness is growing in Mariah’s chest, and she feels the slithery reverberation that she’s come to associate with her hypnotic abilities. She keeps it in check; she wants an interactive toy, not a rag doll.

“Fine,” she says, crossing one knee over the other to rub against the woman’s leg and further pin her in her seat. She feigns excessive, sarcastic disinterest while encroaching on the other’s space in small, but hard to ignore ways.

The woman signals for a stop.

One time, maybe a month or two after she turned, Mariah went out before dawn to try and catch the last drunks staggering out of the late-night bars. It was a desperate attempt to get some blood in her before the sun came up and she had to be at school, after spending a week or more ignoring her hunger to focus on a paper, or to try to ignore how much harder this was turning out to be than she expected, how much harder it kept turning out to be again and again.

As the sun began to rise, she crouched in the shadow of the building, near the exit. No one was coming out. In another act of hubris, she had foregone the cowl-hooded sweatshirt she’d been using all week to avoid the sun, a conscious bet on the expectation of feeding. She was starting to feel weak, but she could still take down a sleep-deprived drunkard without breaking a sweat, if she could only find one.

Maybe she dozed off for a moment. Maybe she was staring into the sun again instead of watching the door. But not twenty feet away, another sickly-looking vampire had caught a middle aged guy who smelled more like vomit than beer, and was in the process of wrestling him to the ground at a bitable angle.

She could feel the air getting warm. She still had to make it to school, or at the very least, she couldn’t spend all day in the shadow of a shitty bar downtown. The backs of her thighs tingled.

She bared her fangs and, surprising herself with her instincts, hissed at the other vamp, who stopped to look up at her with a mixture of fear and resignation. He hissed back and threw the drunk aside and threw himself at Mariah; she threw him out of the shade and into the rising sun.

He shrieked as he caught fire, almost immediately going up with his neck and arms bare to the light. Mariah watched him try to crawl his way back into shadow as he burned, but the same weakness of constitution that made him so flammable kept him trapped in the sun’s rays, and he started to shrivel and turn black as if under a butane torch.

She and the drunk both watched, disgusted and thrilled, until the smell became overbearing. Then she took her breakfast, left the bleeding drunk with the dissipating burned body, and walked to school in the sun, pleasantly tipsy.

The bus pulls up to the stop, and Mariah politely stands so the woman can get out of her seat, but fails to move aside, making the woman go around her to get to the open bus door. Then she follows her down onto to the sidewalk.

“Excuse me. Where are you going?”

When the woman turns around, Mariah’s flipped her supernatural charm on, and an expectant smile subdues the woman’s distress into an unobstructive irritation.

“My boyfriend’s place.”

“Mmm, lucky you. Mind if I walk with you?”

The barest hesitation.

“Sure.”

-

“I just need something to change. Something has to get better. I know I don’t know what I’m signing up for, I know it has nothing to do with her. But I need something. Just one thing. Something has to give. Right?”

Grayson is sitting on the floor of Isaac’s living room, slumped forward over his folded arms on the table-trunk, its edge digging into his upper sternum. Isaac and Nathan sit together on the couch, Nathan keeping his worry off his face while the others sort out the trans vampire business. Isaac is torn; they have no doubt that Grayson needs this, he needs it more than they did, but is he as prepared to cope with the process?

“When’s the last time you fed?” Isaac asks.

Grayson thinks and then answers without picking his head up.

“At least four days. Maybe a week.”

Isaac nods. “I want you off it as long as possible first, okay? Three weeks minimum, a month if possible. And you’ll stay here in the guest room.”

Grayson nods. He can take a month of misery. Right now it even sounds appealing, right in line with his hopelessness and his self-destructive urges. Deterioration will be just fine. He’ll waste away until he can be something else.

Isaac can see it in Grayson’s face, and the hard part for them will be letting him stay in that mindset. It’s unhealthy and upsetting, but it’s also, honestly, the easiest way to get through something like a prolonged feeding fast. He’ll just be an emotionally repressed corpse, sleeping and rotting for a month in the guest room, and the world will go on around him until Isaac is sure it’s the right time... and a month will give them plenty of time to suss out whether Grayson can survive this.

“Okay,” Isaac says. Nathan rubs the back of their shoulder, a strained attempt at comfort.

“Thank you.”

-

He can hear them whispering about him in Isaac’s bedroom. He’s almost three weeks in and he feels like a raisin that’s shriveled in the sun, or an empty paper bag. Both doors are closed, but in the stillness and darkness and worsening muscle atrophy, his sense of hearing is the only possible escape or distraction he has.

“I have to let him do it,” Isaac is saying. “I can’t stop him, I have to help him, but I’m so worried he’s not going to be able to handle it.”

“Well, what will you do if he can’t?”

A long pause.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what would happen.”

“Let’s think it through one piece at a time. What’s the most important thing?”

“That he doesn’t move once we’ve started.”

“There are definitely things we can do about that.”

Grayson can feel the suffering in this pause, resonant with his own rising terror, though he’s too tired to bring it higher than a simmer.

“He’ll be okay.”

“He’s probably been through worse, right?”

“Not like this... Probably. Probably. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s good that you’re being this careful...”

Grayson’s starting to feel nauseated again, but there’s nothing in his stomach to throw up; he’s been allowed water, but he stopped drinking it a few days ago because his body wasn’t holding on to it any more. He pulls the covers over his head and buries his face in his pillow and hopes as hard as he can, which isn’t very hard, that he’ll fall asleep again soon.

-

In full opposition to their usual protocols, Isaac allows themselves a little blood and a little weed on the morning of. They need to be alert and calm for this, plus the fresh sun resistance will be crucial. Today isn’t about how they feel about this, or their anxieties. Today is procedural.

Nathan has to carry Grayson down to the living room. They’ve timed things to get the best possible light, and Nathan’s even laid down a tarp — Isaac is worried it’s still not fireproof and Nathan is sure it’s better than bare carpet. The windows are open behind closed blinds, and a gentle cross breeze fills the room. There’s water on hand. There’s thick blankets for smothering. There are bandages that may or may not get used.

A metal folding chair sits in the center of the room, facing the windows. Getting Grayson into the chair is easy. Making sure that he’s awake and cognizant is more difficult.

“Grayson.”

“Mm.”

“You know what we’re doing now?”

He doesn’t nod so much as swing his head limply to rest on his other shoulder.

“Burn ‘em.”

Isaac puts a hand to his cheek. He’s pale and thin-skinned and freezing, and he stopped shivering long ago.

“It’s going to hurt. We’ll do what we can, but we need you to keep still. You understand?”

He lolls another nod. “Don’t wanna burn anything else.”

“Yeah.” They give him a resigned look and a couple small slaps on the cheek, raising just a little more life in him so he’ll see it coming and be able to prepare himself.

Nathan peels Grayson’s hoodie off his body, carefully manipulating his arms through the sleeves, murmuring repeated apologies and doing his best not to look down — not that he minds, but he knows that Grayson would. Grayson submits without protest, though he shivers briefly once it’s off and he’s sitting bare-chested in the cool breeze from outside. He’s far too tired for shame, but it clings, viscous and vicarious, to the underside of his awareness.

Isaac and Nathan both check the knots on the fire-retardant rope lashing Grayson tightly to the metal chair frame. Then they start on the trickiest part, tucking bolts of fireproof fabric around the ropes, covering Grayson’s ribcage and stomach, over his arms, and across his upper chest, to below his clavicles. It reminds Isaac of an operating theatre, with its blue paper sheets leaving only a rectangular opening with the area of the body to be exhumed, though this fabric is thicker and the retardant coating gives it more of a space-age feel.

The most complicated part is covering Grayson’s face from the sun, and so he won’t be directly inhaling the smoky essence of his own burnt flesh. What Isaac and Nathan have collaborated and decided on is an additional bolt of the fabric, doubled over for extra stiffness, fastened at the back of his neck to create a loose funnel coming up over his face. Isaac thinks it’s good that it will also obscure his vision. They do that in real surgeries, too, in the rare cases where they need their patients awake.

Nathan takes a position by the window, hand poised to pull the cord and let the sunlight come through. Isaac stands behind Grayson and puts their hands on his shoulders, tucked under the fabric, squeezing to try and ground both of them for what’s about to happen.

“Ready?”

“Do it,” Grayson croaks, and Isaac nods, and Nathan raises the blinds.

Grayson’s dry skin goes up instantly, like it’s been hungry for the flames. The shriek that tears through his throat at the sun’s assault is as rough on Isaac’s ears as the raw, fleshy smelling smoke is on their nostrils. The chair jerks in place as Grayson strains at the ropes, his body desperate to escape the pain, and Isaac winds up with an arm around his throat, holding the fabric cone in place against his head-thrashing.

There’s so much more to burn off than there was for Isaac. They have no metric for how deep into Grayson’s tissue the flame is getting except for his physical reactions and what little visual impression they can get through the flame and smoke and movement. But they count down the seconds, like Wretch suggested, and they’re grateful for its research in a new kind of way.

“Drop it!” They yell upon reaching zero, and Nathan lets the shades fall back down. Grayson is convulsing in pain as the sun-borne flames lick up his chest and off the fabric collar protecting his face. Isaac clutches his head to their chest, holding on with difficulty, while Nathan assesses the situation from the front, nervously shifting vantage points and trying to squint through the smoke and heat without getting too close to them. Glimpses of flesh bubble under the flame, darkening, and when it starts looking shriveled and black and Isaac almost loses their grip, Nathan closes in, aims carefully, and throws a bucket of water onto Grayson’s chest, then runs away coughing and waving smoke out of his eyes.

Grayson’s animal shriek dies down with the fire; he stops thrashing, and instead shakes violently, his teeth clacking together. Isaac shoves the cone down to smother anything the water didn’t get, then tears it off and moves around to assess the damage.

Grayson’s chest is a ruin, and Isaac is only able to view it through a detached lens because they’ve been told what to expect. It was so much simpler when Wretch did it for them, they’d only needed a deep surface burn to smooth out what little contour they’d had, but Grayson has — had — a much more substantial amount of breast tissue — more like Wretch’s own shape, now that they think of it — and that required a deeper burn, leaving a not quite bifurcated mass of completely, irrevocably dead flesh, which now needs to be scraped away.

They lean on their medical experience as much as they can, thinking back to the mechanical actions of placing IVs and bandaging wounds that have already been closed by someone else. Nathan drops the set of pre-sterilized tools by the chair and makes a beeline for the kitchen sink to splash some cold water on his face, while Isaac picks up the forceps and scalpel. Grayson seems to have fallen into a daze now that the pain has let up; the tissue Isaac is debriding has had its nerves burnt out, and it looks it.

Nathan returns, looking paler than usual and wiping his forehead, and turns on a couple electric fans, angled to blow the lingering smoke toward the open windows. He tries to look at what Isaac is doing, but his stomach flips immediately and he has to turn away.

“What can I do?”

Isaac finishes the cut they’re making and drops the removed piece into the empty water bucket. They can push themselves through this, but they’re already farther past their limit than they expected to be, and they can’t expect Nathan to do any of the direct physical work on Grayson’s chest, nor does he have the right relationship to Grayson to serve as major emotional support when the physical part is done.

“Call someone,” they say, though they don’t know who.

“Mariah,” Grayson mumbles, softly enough that Isaac might have missed it if they weren’t still carefully tuned in to him.

Nathan looks between Grayson and Isaac, gritting his teeth in a grimace, fingers held half in front of his eyes to obscure a direct view of the burn site. It’s not his call to make.

“Find his phone,” Isaac says in terse defeat, and manipulates another piece of burnt flesh away from Grayson’s body for the scalpel to clear.

-

The sun is more beautiful with the rush of fresh blood in her veins, and it’s been a long time since Mariah has seen it like this, with the time and ambiance to appreciate it. Beneath her hands, the woman from the bus struggles weakly, terror in her eyes contrasting with a dazed, placid expression. She’s not looking anywhere in particular, and her volume doesn’t rise above the level of a whimper, even with an idle hand pressing her windpipe not quite closed and a sharp set of teeth in the base of her throat.

It takes Mariah some time to realize that her phone is buzzing, and when she does, she quickly drops the woman in a heap to dig it out. She sees Grayson’s name on the caller ID just as it gives up on her and stops ringing. She promptly calls him back.

There’s a click, and a voice she doesn’t know says, “Mariah?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“A friend of Grayson’s,” Nathan abbreviates. “Listen, he needs you. Are you near Orchard Street?”

She looks around. She doesn’t think she’s familiar with this neighborhood.

“I don’t know, why?”

“He’s here, and he needs you. Get to 2828 Orchard as fast as you can.” The line clicks off.

Mariah spends only a second in shock before shaking herself out of it and entering the address into her phone. As it loads, she looks down at the woman now sitting with her knees to her chest against the red brick wall, her expression dreamy and anemic. Mariah nicks the pad of her own index finger on one of her fangs, then swipes it inside the woman’s slack-jawed mouth. Her own blood, processed through Mariah’s vampiric body systems, brings the color back to her face, and the holes in her neck begin to close. Mariah licks the remaining blood off her healed skin — distasteful, compared to sucking an open wound — and then snaps her fingers in front of the woman’s face. She comes to with a start, and Mariah helps her up.

“You’re fine,” she says. “Go see your boyfriend.”

Mariah leaves the stranger wobbling in the alleyway and strides purposefully back onto the street, eyes taking in the map and tracing over the proposed routes before settling on her own. She can’t help but smile despite the forebodingly ambiguous emergency; she’s going to see her boyfriend.

-

When Isaac finally reaches what they judge to be the end of the necessary debridement, they collapse onto the couch and sit very, very still. Nathan finishes loosening Grayson’s bonds and tries to help him to his feet, but he’s unresponsive aside from little moans when he’s moved or tugged. Trying to think creatively, Nathan pushes the chair, Grayson and all, across the carpet, dragging the dirty tarp as it goes. He’s able to move Grayson directly from the chair to the couch, laying him down carefully with his head on Isaac’s lap.

Nathan runs upstairs and comes back with a hand rolled joint, which he lights and passes to Isaac. They smoke, their free hand resting on Grayson’s stomach, while Nathan starts cleaning up the room, borrowing the joint for a puff here and there between tasks. He rolls up the tarp to clean off later, probably outside, and stacks it with the coated fabric in a corner; takes the bucket of supernatural medical waste to the kitchen, pointedly not looking inside, and lays a large plate over the top as a temporary lid; and is about to bring the folding chair back into the kitchen when the front door bangs open downstairs.

There’s the sound of a jiggling handle, and Nathan calls, “Up here,” before she can break into the locked first floor. Mariah ascends, throws open the door, and sweeps through the kitchen into the doorway of the living room. She sees Grayson prostrate on the couch, takes in the ruddy raw wounds across his chest, and a wide-eyed shock passes briefly over her face before she wipes it clean.

Isaac glares at her through heavy, tired eyes. She walks up to them, cocks her hip and crosses her arms.

“May I?”

Begrudgingly and without breaking eye contact, Isaac slips out from under Grayson, moving aside to allow Mariah to take their seat and rearrange Grayson in her own lap. Nathan takes Isaac’s hand, gently urging them closer so he can rub their back. Grayson makes a small whine of pain and leans his face into the comforting darkness of Mariah’s stomach as she takes a closer look at the burn wounds on his chest and begins to notice how much not just paler but thinner he is than usual.

She drums her fingers against his empty stomach and looks back toward Isaac, matching their glare.

“Can he eat?”

There’s a moment of delay before Isaac snaps out of some vengeful reverie to take in her question.

“A little bit,” they answer defensively. “More if it doesn’t start to heal.”

She looks back down at the way they’re positioned, his head and upper shoulders supported by her thighs, his enormous open wound facing upward — he won’t be able to roll over much. Figuring it will do for now, she again slices the pad of her finger against one of her own fangs, then lightly rests the finger with its swelling pearl of blood against Grayson’s parted lips. He wastes no time sucking her finger into his mouth, struggling to pull more drops from the wound before it closes.

“Good boy,” Mariah murmurs with a smile; she can’t help herself. Grayson whines and arches his neck as she withdraws her finger. There’s a faint bit of color coming back to his cheeks, a little more voice to his mindless sighs, but no signs of change to his chest. “Let me bandage you up, and you can have some more, okay?”

Isaac, meanwhile, is looking paler and nauseated, and Nathan decides it’s time to remove them from the overly personal scene now taking place before them.

“Come on,” he whispers. “Let’s go wait upstairs.” But Isaac shakes their head. The only thing that seems worse to them right now than watching this play out is leaving Grayson alone with her. They don’t trust her as far as Grayson in his current state could throw her.

Nathan leads them into the kitchen instead and closes the rarely-used door between the two rooms, but leaves it cracked, to better hear if anything actionably objectionable happens. Isaac sits in the hard metal chair and lays their head down atop their folded arms. Nathan squeezes their elbow, sits across from them, and resigns himself to keeping auditory watch with his fingers circling against Isaac’s scalp, hoping to lull them into a better rest if not actual sleep.

It’s quiet in the living room. Mariah makes use of the supplies Nathan previously laid out on top of the trunk, opening fresh boxes and making uneducated guesses about best practices for bandaging burn wounds. After taping on some padding, she urges him upright, and he manages to hold himself up as she winds a bandage around and around his chest, nudging his arms aside to slip her hands under, over and over again. She fastens the end in the front, then lays her hands on his shoulders and squeezes.

Grayson breathes deep into his lungs, testing the pressure of the wrap. It feels firm, solid, safe — like his chest is protected as long as he doesn’t actually touch it. His intact nerves still ache with electric heat, but the incomprehensible raw vulnerability, the feeling of not having, but _being_ , an open wound, is finally starting to fade from active memory. He relaxes into Mariah’s touch, letting her work at the stress in his body.

She leans close enough that her breath whispers against his ear.

“Still hungry?”

And he remembers that he is, he’s _so_ hungry, but now the fast is over. Stunningly, he’s made it to the other side of the countdown, as intact as he hoped to be.

Mariah does most of the work, but they move as one to turn Grayson around, and when he loses his balance and falls on her, she eases him off of the couch and onto the carpeted floor, shoving the trunk away with her foot to make room. He rests a cheek against the bare stretch of thigh just past the hem of her short skirt, arms stretching to hug her around the hips, and he thinks he’s leaning part of the wound on her knee but he can’t really feel it with all the compression and he’s so comfortable and tired.

She hikes her skirt even farther up her legs, shifting around him, and taps one dark-nailed finger on a spot just shy of her femoral artery. Grayson has to dig his fingers into her plush hips in order to drag himself further into her lap, sniffing hungrily til he reaches the indicated spot and sinks his fangs in with a groan of ecstatic relief.

Mariah looks down at him, clinging to her for dear life, and she can _see_ the warmth flowing from her body into his, the color filling back in under his skin, the capillaries straining from disuse and bursting, freckling him with bruises. Her wound keeps trying to knit itself closed, but Grayson keeps biting it open for more of the half-digested blood oozing from the superficial vein in her upper thigh. His grip strengthens as his emptiness is slowly filled and overtaken by furor.

He looks up at her, lips stained venous dark. For a moment his eyes are an open door and Mariah feels like she can see clean through his dilated pupils to his soul, if she believed in souls, radiating love and warmth and gratitude in their most undiluted form. Then he presses his lips to her skin again, and she feels the pinch and tear again, but she doesn’t mind — he can only bite the same spot so many times before she stops feeling it as pain.

She’s used to letting Grayson feed on her, or forcing him to, as a power play, drawing on the taboo nature of the act and using the short-lived secondhand high that it brings to her advantage. It’s a trump card she’s kept up her sleeve for years: her blood forces control from inside the other’s body, seizing their attention, forcing the arousal of their senses.

But this time feels different. Her hand settles on his head and it doesn’t feel _right_ to yank him by the hair like she normally would. She doesn’t think it’s just because he’s wounded and weak, because she’s never really given a shit about that in the past; if anything, it would be something else for her to use. That’s the only way to improvise well — to know everything, and use _all_ of it.

But Grayson is using her now, as a lifeline, a pinch-hitter of a defibrillator to jump start his near-stilled heart. She moves her fingers to his nape and feels his pulse thrumming underneath, his blood from her veins. He’s taking what he needs from her, and she’s happy to let him, happy to be the one that he’s using for this — why is she the one that he’s using for this? — and yes, her fingers still curl around his ear and find a loose grip in his hair behind it, but she also burns with a contentedness so deep that it almost gives her whiplash.

He slows in his feeding with reluctance, filling up quickly even on vampire blood. His teeth want to tear into her thigh again. He’s missed this so much.

Wait — _what?_

The world beyond the taste in his mouth and the warmth in his body starts to fill back in: the eclectic colors and textures of Isaac’s living room; the deep ache around the front of his upper body; the cool breeze on his back, bare save for the wrap bandage; and the source of the acid-iron heat, Mariah’s tan thighs in his face and broad hips in his arms. His stomach lurches at the thought that he just had about feeding, about missing the rush of fresh blood in his mouth, he’s never liked that part of it — it must be the starvation talking.

He licks his lips and lifts his head up. His eyes find Mariah’s and take a moment to pull her blurry, fractured image into focus. He’s prepared to hate her. He’s prepared to storm out the door or have Isaac and Nathan kick her out. He’s prepared to do anything at all to avoid giving her the chance to boil over and lash out at him again.

She’s looking at him in a way he doesn’t know. He has to scrutinize how her features bend and compare them to a mental database to figure out that it’s because nothing in her face, in this moment, is desperately searching for control. Normally there’s a hint of a panicked edge in the corners of her eyes, if you know how to find it through the smokescreen. But without the panic, there’s no need for the smokescreen, and without the smokescreen, there’s no need for cruelty.

Grayson pushes off her knees with his hands and sits back on his heels. Mariah watches him and nothing more. He feels the ancient rumble of his anger, concentrated layers of the sediment of so many years of brainwashing him, assaulting him, controlling him, stealing away his life and making his death a living hell. She can’t just show up when he’s in trouble, when he’s weak, and get away with everything. She can’t just be the hero and win the boy, because he knows she’ll be back on her high horse tomorrow —

“I’m sorry,” Mariah says. She leans forward in her seat, reaching for Grayson’s hand, and gently takes it in both of her own, rubbing her thumb back and forth over his knuckles and through the dips between. She feels like she should say more, but the details are both fleeting and overwhelming, a hurricane of damnation viewed from the eye of the storm. Something about this is right. Something about how and why she left last time she saw him was wrong.

“I’m sorry.”

He believes her.

**Author's Note:**

> This concludes “part one” of this series. There will be more, under a new series header with a different title, so please keep an eye out for that if you’ve enjoyed these! Thanks so much for reading.


End file.
